Despite covering 70% of the earths' surface, little is known about the subsea environment. Its nearly-impermeable communication medium and great pressures make accessing subsea information a daunting challenge.
Subsea optical communication systems could soon be used to provide widespread information about the subsea environment. Thousands of small self-powered optical nodes dropped out of a plane could carpet the ocean floors making the subsea environment abundant with accessible information.
The greatest challenge for vast subsea networks is the limited battery power of each optical node. Remotely powering these nodes is possible but power transfer is limited. The core problem is the high power required by these nodes during data transmission. For example, a typical node only consumes as low as 10−4 mW in the listening state (or polling state), but consumes between 1 and 100 mW during transmission.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a system, apparatus and method that takes into account at least some of the issues discussed above, as well as possibly other issues.